Computational Linguistics
Editor's Report for 2005-2006
Robert Dale
1 OVERVIEW
The journal maintains its position as a high-impact publication
vehicle with a strong reputation. Our submissions were up for
the reported year, but our speed of reviewing was down.
The major issue this year has been a coninuation of our copy-editing
and typesetting problems. MIT Press switched typesetters to an operation
based in the Philippines; during the first year we had various problems
with typesetting, most of which have now been resolved but some of which
still remain; in particular, we have yet to obtain a bug free set of macros
for our authors to use. Then, our long-standing freelance copy editor
resigned to take up another position, and MIT Press switched to using the
typesetter for copy-editing. Although this has some apparent advantages
it has also been something of a nightmare, with significant problems arising
in the copy editing process. We are still trying to resolve a number
of issues here.
Some minor changes to the journal:
-
At the end of each year, we now print the names of all
the non-editorial-board reviewers who helped out that year.
- The 'Last Words' is in the process of switching from one
column per year to one per issue, as of the first issue in 2007.
- Just after Coling/ACL, we will announce a new category of 'review papers'.
2 SPECIAL ISSUES
One close to appearance: 'Question Answering in Restricted Domains'.
The quality of the papers received for this was not great, so we will end up
with three papers; this will probably appear as a special section rather than
being an entire special issue.
Two others with closing submission dates around now:
- Prepositions in Applications
- Semantic Role Labeling
3 STATISTICS
Time to first decision for new submissions:
For 2001 papers: 110 days
For 2002 papers: 127 days
For 2003 papers: 129 days
For 2004 papers: 131 days
For 2005 papers: 146 days
80 Submissions consisting of 62 New (+3 Resubmissions of a new
submission in 2005), 14 Resubmissions (+1 Resubmission of a
resubmission in 2005).
Here's the traditional 'disposition by first decision' table:
Decision 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999
Submitted 62 53 65 65 57 64 47
Accept 13 11 16 23 18 15 13
Reject 29 22 20 20 12 11 9
Resubmit as squib 0 3 2 2 2 1 3
Revise and resubmit 37 23 25 18 22 27 12
Withdrawn 0 1 0 2 3 3 2
No decision 1 2 2 0 0 7 8
This looks like our numbers of submissions are fairly static with
a drop in 2004, but that's not the case:
since 2004, we now factor out resubmissions of papers initially
submitted in earlier years whereas previously these were counted
in the total number of submissions. This means our number of
submissions is actually up.
Here's the breakdown by country of first author for the paper submitted in
2003 and 2004:
2003 2004 2005
Europe
Bulgaria 1 0 0
Finland 1 2 0
France 3 1 1
Germany 4 2 4
Iran 2 1 0
Ireland 0 1 0
Israel 1 2 0
Italy 1 1 0
Netherlands 1 1 1
Poland 1 1 0
Portugal 2 0 1
Romania 0 1 0
Slovenia 0 1 1
Spain 2 5 4
Sweden 2 0 0
Switzerland 0 1 2
Turkey 1 0 1
United Kingdom 7 8 14
North America
Canada 5 4 6
Mexico 1 0 0
United States 21 12 25
Asia
China 0 3 3
Hong Kong 3 0 1
India 1 1 1
Japan 2 1 0
Iran 0 0 1
Korea 0 1 1
New Zealand 0 0 1
Singapore 0 0 2
Taiwan 2 0 0
Thailand 1 0 0
Vietnam 0 1 0
South America
Brazil 1 2 0
Total 65 53 76
At the time of writing, for 2006 we have the following:
31 Submissions and Resubmissions consisting of 18 New, 12
Resubmissions (+1 Resubmission of a resubmission in 2006)
Ave time to decision for New submissions: 66 days
2006 Decisions:
Submitted 31
Accept 4
Reject 3
Revise and resubmit 4
No decision yet 20
(Note: At this time in 2004, we had 42 submissions)
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